So, where are we at feature-wise? I stopped playing after they transitioned to the pay-for-the-updates system so what came after that?

We've advanced tremendously. We've got much better flight simulation, patched conics for the orbit map (You can see where you will enter Munar orbit), another moon (Minimus), a building for building spaceplanes (Horizontal symmetry), a mountain of new plug-in based mods and new atmospheric engines.

Hi, your local devthread hobo here again with some new stuff about the patcher.

The patcher was added late in the 0.14.x development series in order to simplify updating and reduce update download sizes, and unfortunately, it has had a bunch of problems. The main concerns are that the entire patching system is huge (about 120MB), uses mostly third-party code, is unreliable, and it is incapable of downloading itself when it's updated. In essence, it's been a huge pain and hasn't really been as useful as we originally intended. We've made a few quick fixes here and there to it, but it still needs a lot of work. In this light, we've made it one of the higher priorities to fix, and after a few false starts and distractions (including University, yay summer), I finally have an open schedule for working on it.

Many problems stem from how the patcher was originally structured. Right now, it uses Unity to draw the UI and handle events, which makes it simply enormous and adds thousands of useless dependencies and inefficiencies, contributing to the astronomical size of the current patcher. I've rewritten the UI in Windows.Forms (don't worry, Mac/Linux users; Mono can handle Winforms on your platforms) and ditched Unity, so beyond a few compression libraries, it's now completely standalone and is down to about 500KB in size. The UI isn't particularly pretty, but complex UIs can mess up the Mono compatibility, and the UI isn't really a focus right now anyway; The most important part is the functionality and reliability of the system.

The current system just blindly attempts to apply patches to files, and if something breaks, you're left with a big, fat pile of corrupted files, and further attempts to "redo" the patch will just make them even more messed up. To correct this, I'm planning to add a checksum manifest to the patches that tells the patcher what the "old" files MUST look like before it'll even try a patching operation. In addition, the patcher will generate the finished file in a temporary folder while patching and will only copy the file over if nothing goes wrong. This way if something does go wrong, the corruption will just be in that temporary folder, and not in your KSP installation. If the files on your computer don't match up with what the patcher is expecting to see, it'll ask if you want to redownload KSP and then start downloading that huge ZIP file from the website for you and will overwrite your install with the correct files. No more digging through the website to fix your install. I might also have it ask what to do about any stock parts you overwrite (for those horrible people doing terrible things to C7's engines and stuff).

In the past, we were also using a third-party binary patching program that we crammed into the installation, which allows us to just send you the parts of KSP that have changed between versions. Executing this little program could be troublesome with some types of environments, and we could not directly change it due to licensing, on top of the juggling of the different editions of the program for each OS we support. To solve these problems, I've managed to find some code that replicates that program that we can legally include in our patcher, and we can modify it as we see fit. Since it's built-in, we don't have to worry as much about cross-platform support, and it's also a bit more memory-efficient. It's also free, which is always cool. I plan to instrument the heck out of the patcher and throw together some unit tests for it so we can be sure that it works properly before we dump it on your laps.

I'm not sure whether the patcher will be completed for 0.16 due to the sheer immensity of the problems it has manifested and the amount of code that I have to fix and refactor, plus the links with our web infrastructure that need some TLC. However, it is definitely my main project for the foreseeable future (unless the plugin stuff breaks or needs more features), and I'm making steady progress in getting it ready for primetime. Hopefully, it'll fit all your needs and won't be such a pain in the rear to use.

The complete rocket
1st stage seperation
2nd stage seperation. It lasted for quite a while, but I actually needed that for later.
Landed!
Going back home.
Don't have a decoupler so I gotta have to land the entire lander
But I (sort of) managed to do so! At first I hoped for a landing in the ocean (as I got), but as I think of it now, a land landing would probably have saved the rest of the lander. Anyways, mission successful!

Will we be able to use our E.V.A thruster packs while hanging on a ladder, and also, will jumping off of ladders follow Newton's laws of motion? So, jumping off would provide a small amount of force to the ladder (and thus whatever it is attached to).

Right now, that's not possible, but I have been thinking about that, and it would be a very interesting thing to do. However, I think that sort of interaction with physical objects needs its own dedicated feature maybe.

About Newton-correct forces when ladder climbing, I did my best here to keep the Kerbals as physically significant as I could while writing the EVA control code. However, character physics, apart from ragdolls, is an exceedingly complex subject. Consider, for instance, how hugely complicated a system of forces, torques and friction you'd need just to simulate something as simple as walking, You'd have to consider the friction coefficients of both the walking surface and the boot soles, consider the area of the boots that touches the ground at any given time during the walk cycle, calculate the forces that result from that friction system and the torque that's being applied to the thigh and calf joints, all to make the character move around.

Needless to say, to make this a feasible endeavour, we have to cut a few corners. It's far easier to just move the character forward while playing an animation that looks like walking, and the end result is much easier to tune and work with.

Long story short then, for character control, we chose to put top priority on gameplay and feel, not realism. That isn't saying characters behave completely unrealistically though, but on the other hand, no one should expect complete physical accuracy from them either.

Worry not though, the space flight physics for EVAs are the same as for vessels. Given enough RCS fuel, you could orbit your way back to Kerbin, without a ship.

How is fuel for Kerbal EVA packs going to be handled? Is it going to be infinite? Is it going to be "you get so much per EVA, and it resets when you dock," or "you get so much per pack?" Or maybe you'll be able to refuel from RCS tanks on a given spacecraft?

It's not going to be infinite. That would make it possible to just forget the ships and go 'solo', and that's quite silly, even for Kerbal standards.

Most likely you will be given a finite amount of fuel when you leave the ship/base/station, and to refuel, you'd need to board it to leave again with a full tank. That would keep it simple and realistic, limiting your range of action with EVAs alone, unless you take some sort of mobile base with you for long expeditions.

Cheers

HarvesteR posted:

Here's a new progress update:

The EVA ladder system is very much done I think. At least concerning what it needs to do for now... That means there are only a few other things left to do to be able to call EVAs ready.

First and foremost, the game needs to be able to spawn a Kerbal EVA at the pod's airlock, and also later let you board the ship again through that same airlock. We also need to rig up a menu of sorts on the crew portraits, to let you select which Kerbal to EVA (or IVA) with.

Also, and not at all less importantly, we still need to finish the low-gravity walk system. Right now, what we have just doesn't cut it. We'll need to dedicate some effort to get it working nicely.

With those bits done, we just need to polish and clean up, and set up support features to integrate EVAs in the game, like UI bits and such.

It's still to early to be talking about experimentals and all though... I'm just happy to see that EVAs are past the half-way point now.